Running for Your Life: Mo’ Canada

When it comes to my adopted country’s political season, where best to look for moral direction than Canada – my home and native land.

For those of you who didn’t see it on Facebook, check out this post

http://wapo.st/2epGSsp

Are Canadians too smug in their modesty? We’d rather not stake such a claim.

Consider my recent post about the quote I discovered from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

My childhood pal Frederick Harrison points out that this quote – and many many others –  received wide distribution in Canada in November 1967 (and to radio listeners around the world from the dynamic ideas program, The Massey Lectures on CBC Radio).

Here is the link to those lectures: http://bit.ly/2eL2a7g

As I wrote to Frederick in a recent commentary, the Massey Lectures have been truly formative in my thinking, travel and have shaped the way I see the world.  Most important for me was the 1984 Carlos Fuentes, "Latin America At War With the Past" that I listened to during the days I was employed as assistant night editor at the Windsor Star. Just a few months before I'd returned from three months living in Mexico (with a one-week tour of Cuba). In January 1985, I was back in Cuba, and in July, to Nicaragua where I wrote news articles during the sixth anniversary of the Sandinista revolution.

Next: Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

Running for Your Life: Ed Whitlock Rocks!

OK, I had planned to post today about pace setting. Not in terms of racing, but just for those looking for guidance on an overlooked part of road training. Going out too fast. How do you stay within yourself? Listening to your body. Feeling comfortable with slow.

Then Ed Whitlock came along, courtesy of my pal in Canada, Susan Wright. When it comes to Running for Your Life, pause a moment to read this article and consider the last forty-plus years of Ed Whitlock's life. (I started running in 1976, so my forty-plus begins in January ...)

http://bit.ly/2dZ4IeH

Rime of the Ancient Marathoner, indeed !

Next: Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Imagine if Dr. King were with us. For a fleeting moment I felt he was this morning, when I saw the quote below on signage in front of a Catholic Church in Gowanus, Brooklyn:

"Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Something our political leaders (and wannabe leaders) should show. If only.

Next: Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

  

Running for Your Life: Deep State S—t

Here are some uncheery thoughts.

Political campaigns may just be the leading growth business in post-industrial America. (Hurry! Please donate today to CAMPAIGN _________. There has never been a greater threat to civilization as we know it than the prospect of a ____________ Party victory. Don’t delay! Pony up today!)

And what do you get for that investment? Hope and change? Or more of the same?

Surprise! More of the same. That equates to trillions spent on defense and foreign policy prerogatives that have been proven failures, at best, and elitist pet projects, at worst.

Do politicians earn the right to represent us after filling their pockets from coins from our pockets? Yes. Do they actually control (or even mildly have influence to fiddle with) the levers of power in such a way as to earn the trust we put in them by our honest investments in their business. No. Not even close.

I read a lot of books: novels at home and nonfiction – primarily political and social science books – during my daily commutes to and from my paying job. Hands down the most interesting I’ve read this season is Mike Lofgren’s THE DEEP STATE http://bit.ly/2e4U19B.

DEEP STATE s—t is scary s—t. As scary as Trump being president? Well, no. But scary enough to warrant a new wave of folk considering asylum in Canada if its central messages were to be given wider distribution.

In our daily news feeds, the deep state doesn’t get discussed much. Consider what J. Edgar Hoover did in the 1950s-1970s (See THE BURGLARY http://bit.ly/2ebfJrr )  What Dwight D. Eisenhower complained about in his famous military industrial complex speech in 1961.

In the Hill-Pill debates, what time is given to balancing privacy concerns with national security? What gets classified? We know that Hillary used a personal e-mail server but do we ask the question: What does get classified? Who is in charge of those policies and practices? What are the checks and balances?

The deep state – the Washington, DC, Puzzle Palace – is in charge. And democracy? That’s the fastest-growing civilian business in post-industrial Amerca. It’s like melting gold and pouring it into an unused well in coal country.

Fraud, baby.

Next: Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

  

Running for Your Life: Faceplant or Face-plant?

Hmm. One word or hyphenated?

Current Merriam-Webster shows the word as hyphenated, to mean a sudden face-first fall.

In word use the hyphen has a way of dissolving – usually over a long period of time like forest rock giving way to matsutake mushrooms. But that process can be hurried by constant use.

In my case that applies. It just so happens the “faceplant” has emerged as my own private injury method. On Thursday, Sept. 29, only two days before my scheduled half-marathon in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, I managed my second faceplant in two years. The first one occurred when I faceplanted while walking the dog: one hand holding a hot coffee, the other the dog leash, and Wham!, I tripped over Thurber’s back leg and went down chin-first on pavement.

Seven stitches later I went to The Post to work on a Sunday.

Then, on that last Thursday in September, I’m face-first again, this time while on a final training run before the Oct. 1 race. While on a Prospect Park trail I was zooming along, feeling no pain, when I tripped on a tree root – Screw You, Tree Root, my daughter K rejoined – and fell even harder than the first time: Right on the same spot as I’d injured during the dog-tripping incident. Then off to the clinic: 12 stitches this time (because the collision was harder, my teeth opened a wound in the roof of my mouth.)

The upshot? No Bay Ridge Half. And yes, this result in the spelling of “faceplant.” It’s on my mind so much now that when I close my eyes I see the hyphen dissolving like Alka-Seltzer in water.   

Next: Running for Your Life: Deep State S--t